President Clinton is in a funny mood these days. On June 23 he gave a
gloomy speech complaining that official Washington is: gloomy. Saying "You
listen to some of these people talk in the nation's capital, you'd think
that they spent the whole morning sucking lemons," the President boasted
of his own unifying influence: "I have done everything I can as president
to heal the kind of divisive, destructive political climate that has come
to dominate too much of the discourse in Washington."

But has he? Nine days before his "gloomy" speech the President's
topic du jour was race, and his tactic was the race card.

Speaking at the University of California at San Diego, ostensibly to
proclaim the need for racial reconciliation, the President chose to focus
on defending racial preferences. Never mind that racial preferences are
a divisive issue that drives the races apart. Never mind that preferences
aren't even supported by a majority of black Americans (a June 17 poll by
the liberal Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, African-Americans
disapproved of "preferential treatment" by 49.8% to 42.5%). Never
mind that most black Americans aren't helped by preferences, and many are
actually harmed by them.

Insisting that the prosperity of black Americans is severely dependent
on racial preferences also diverts public discussion away from the real
reforms that communities need. Instead of being divisive, why doesn't the
president insist that public schools do a better job so disadvantaged students
can obtain the scores needed to gain admissions to better educational institutions?
Why doesn't the president embrace school choice as an incentive to force
public schools to compete with private schools that do a better job? Why
doesn't the president embrace proposed legislation like the American Community
Renewal Act that would increase investment in urban communities and create
employment opportunities for people living there?

The answer is simple. The President prefers Americans divided. When Americans
are divided he can make a case that there are "good guys" and
"bad guys," and submit himself as the top "good guy."
This hot air strategy is a lot easier than submitting real proposals to
Congress and working with Congress to build a sounder, stronger, more unified
American future.

So the president is addicted to division, and sees the race card as a
good hand. Noting this, the African-American leadership group Project 21
recently decided upon the "Top Ten Acts of the Clinton Administration
To Divide Americans By Race and Ethnicity." Their difficulty came not
only in ranking the acts, but in limiting them to ten. Some of their "Top
Ten" acts include:

* As Texas state universities sought to comply with a Fifth Circuit Court
ruling in Hopwood v. Texas that different admissions policies by
race were unconstitutional, Norma Cantu, chief of the Education Department's
Office of Civil Rights, mailed letters to the universities threatening to
cut off federal funding if the court ruling -- the law of the land -- was
followed. Cantu later backed down on her threat.

* After the Administration's fundraising scandal broke, a Commerce Department
memo recommended defending Clinton and Gore by attacking critics of the
scandal as "anti-Asian." In his state of the Union speech the
President played the race card by implying that critics of his fundraising
techniques harbored anti-Asian sentiments.

* Despite the Adarand Supreme Court ruling finding most of the
federal government's set-aside programs unconstitutional, the Administration
refuses to eliminate them. A memo written by two White House aides entitled
"Affirmative Action Review: A Report to the President," did not
recommend eliminating even one of the 171 existing federal affirmative action
programs.

* The Administration's Justice Department filed an amicus curiae brief
against California's Proposition 209 arguing that the proposition -- which
would do no more than bar California state government agencies from discriminating
on the basis of race and sex -- was unconstitutional.

The contradictions between the rhetoric and actions of the Clinton Administration
on the issue of race are neverending. On May 16, President Clinton formally
apologized on behalf of the U.S. government for experiments conducted on
black victims of syphilis starting in the 1930s without their knowledge.
Yet two years earlier he nominated Dr. Henry Foster for Surgeon General.
Foster had been vice-president of a medical society that endorsed the continuation
of the syphilis study in 1969.

The Clinton Administration has flip-flopped twice on whether a New Jersey
school board should be allowed to use race as a factor in deciding which
teachers to lay-off.

As Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton sent a letter of praise to Wisconsin
legislator Polly Williams for her school choice bill to help minority children
escape from substandard public schools. As President, Bill Clinton opposed
a more limited school choice bill for children in Washington D.C. on the
grounds that federal funds shouldn't be used for private schools.

President Clinton is a man of many contradictions. No wonder he -- and
the nation's capital -- is so gloomy.

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Note: New Visions Commentaries reflect the views of their author and not
necessarily those of Project 21.